Paolo Bacigalupi: Colorado's top NBA prospect?

Forget Carmelo Anthony. Our hopes for NBA glory this season are riding on Paolo Bacigalupi, a gifted but not particularly tall sensation from Paonia.

That's NBA as in the National Book Awards. And fond as we are of Melo's tweets, we're banking on NBA finalist Paolo as the state's best shot at literary acclaim.

This week's cover story, "Like an Open Book," delves into the life and work of Denver novelist John Williams, the only Colorado author to win the National Book Award for fiction since the ceremonies began sixty years ago. Augustus, Williams' magisterial study of the rise of Octavius Caesar, shared the prize with John Barth's Chimera in 1973.

But this year, Colorado has another strong contender in Bacigalupi, whose dystopic-future chase novel Ship Breaker is one of five finalists in the "Young People's Literature" category. The book is his first foray into the young adult market after Bacigalupi won critical acclaim for his very adult sci-fi short stories and his first published novel, The Windup Girl, which Time listed as one of the top ten works of fiction of 2009.